That would be great. I'm not sure how to solve the problems that arises though. If i can send an anonymous vote to an instance, what stops me from sending 100?
Maybe there's some smart cryptographical solution here that alludes me, but it seems hard, if possible.

[–] Feathercrown 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You could just hash your username+instance combo, right?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

hmm, how would the receiving instance verify? what happens if I send 100 random hashes?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

This is literally already a problem. I can easily set up an instance and write a simple bot which just spams votes with randomized user strings. There are generally a bunch of these functional vulnerabilities in the AP trust model which are only mitigated by the current lack of scale. Work needs to be put into reworking the trust model, not exposing user telemetry to even more people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I can easily set up an instance and write a simple bot which just spams votes with randomized user strings.

Well you can do that for a little bit, until your instance gets found out and it gets defederated. And you need to pay for a new domain if you want to do it again. So the current system actually makes it cost real money to do this spam you're talking about.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Sure, but the detection and enforcement mechanism would be the same as it is now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

well, since the voting is public it's easy to remove your votes and block your instance after the fact

[–] Feathercrown 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Each instance could store a static private key used to encrypt all usernames in that instance maybe?